Impacts of Deploying Reactors Fueled by High-Assay Low Enriched Uranium

The ANS Chicago Section invites you to a presentation from Amanda Bachmann of Argonne National Laboratory about the impacts of deploying reactors fueled by High-Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU).

The US is looking to deploy new reactor designs that will require HALEU fuel, which is needed by the current fleet of commercial reactors. Amanda's work models the deployment of select advanced reactors and the fuel cycle impacts of those deployments, as well as how decisions about those deployments affect the fuel cycle impacts. In addition, this work introduces a new method of dynamically modeling fuel depletion during a fuel cycle simulation.

Amanda is a postdoctoral researcher in the Reactor and Fuel Cycle Analysis Group at Argonne National Laboratory. Her work focuses on modeling, simulation, and software development for nuclear fuel cycle analysis. Previous work also includes modeling and simulation for nonproliferation safeguards applications. She holds a PhD in Nuclear, Plasma, Radiological Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2023), an MS (2020) and BS (2019) in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In her free time, she enjoys crocheting, gymnastics, and playing with her rabbit, Little R.